On Stefan Zweig

[Chris Konstantine]

Have any of you read "Beware of Pity" or heard of the author Stefan Zweig?

I must admit that I had no idea either existed until one day a few years back. Here's what happened.

I was walking through the old town in Nicosia perusing the shops. Like many other old towns, my time spent exploring them told me to get off the main strip and start investigating the side streets. That's when I saw it. It was a bookstore, the kind we use to see in the US once upon a time. This was no chain store, just some indie shop with a huge window display stacked to the brim with hardcovers and paperbacks.

Of course I walked into the shop straight away, and therein I met the owner. He was an elderly gent, perhaps physically weak, but his spirit shone through his eyes with a blinding radiance. Conversation soon followed and time quickly lost meaning, to this day I'm not certain if I was there minutes or hours. At some point he asked me if I would like to buy a book, and more importantly what kind of books I liked to read.

That's a hard question for me to answer, because I don't have a particular genre I'm drawn to, I just like good books. In this case, not knowing how to reply, I decided I would do so in a manner he could relate to and suggested that The Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque had made an impression on me. The old man smiled with a mischievous grin and quickly scampered up one of his ladders to select a rather worn and old hard-cover book, the color was red. "Here" he said, handing me the book, "This is written by Stefan Zweig, you will love it"

I'll be damned, the man was absolutely correct. This was exactly the kind of book that I read in one sitting, which is what did, not bothering to put it down until the story was finished. It was sad but sweet, relatable and extremely well written.

If you've read it, I think you know what I mean, If you haven't and encounter it, give it a shot. The old man knew a thing or two.